


Give Of Yourself (When Time Is All You've Got)

by SharkyIsSnarky



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Gift Exchange, Gift Giving, Holidays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 16:49:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17207204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharkyIsSnarky/pseuds/SharkyIsSnarky
Summary: "Do you get what I'm saying?"Somehow Naruto suspects that Sakura is not advising him to give everyone rocks.Giving gifts is a lot harder than Naruto ever expected.





	Give Of Yourself (When Time Is All You've Got)

**Author's Note:**

> For Kenjo. Merry Ninjamas.

This wasn't what any of them had expected when they had discussed a holiday as a team. Naruto for one had been imagining a kotatsu and bad jokes in an apartment far too cramped for six people who were inevitably going to stay there as long as possible. He had been expecting his tinny old radio melding with Sakura's laughter. He had been expecting an evening watching Sasuke and Sai attempt to agree on how to cook anything because "tis the season" and whatnot. He had been thinking of Captain Yamato shuffling cards and Kakashi-Sensei already planning how to cheat. He hadn't been expecting... well, this.

  
"Naruto come on!" Sakura called, hauling her gifts around with ease. "You've been staring at a watch display for five minutes."

  
"Sakura-chaaaan! Give me a minute!" He whined.

  
"No. Come on! There are plenty of stalls left." And it was true, the Konoha market district was large and full of gifts but none of them felt right.

  
"How did you buy your gifts so quickly?"

  
"I planned. Like you should have." She tosses her hair and the pink locks that are in the odd no man's land between chin and shoulders dance. They reach around her jaw and tap her nose at the motion and she huffs. "Knew I should have gotten a hair cut." Naruto digs a hair clip she left in his pocket out, and it's without thought that he reaches over and settles it into place. Easy and familiar. It's lopsided and not as neat as it could be but it's at least done.

  
"Think giving everyone on the team a haircut is a good idea?" He asks absently as they pass a stall hawking the blandest looking shirts he's ever seen. Team haircuts could be cool, but he's not making it or buying them individually. That's cheating right?

  
"If you touch my hair you'll be missing two arms." Sakura threatens lightly.

  
"Come on, Sakura-chan! All of us with the same haircut! Wouldn't that be-" he dances a bit ahead and out of swatting range with the goofiest grin he can manage "Youthful?"

The joke hits home, that perfect combination of letting Sakura play the straightlaced one while leaving the opportunity to engage in such nonsense wide open. She smiles and steps closer in order to knock his shoulder against hers.

  
"If you give Sasuke a bowl cut he'll leave the village again!" She giggles out, and he laughs along with her. Once upon a time such a joke would have stunned them both and had them brooding the rest of the day, reaching after someone who was gone or freshly returned, ignoring Sai because of the shadow he had been forced to live in.

Two years have passed, they have healed and new skin has grown over the way their experiences had cut them so deep. It will never be invisible, and they never forget, but it no longer stings. Something about seeing Sasuke sleep deprived and threatening to leave the village again over them drinking all his disgusting pitch black coffee has made a threat into a fond recollection.

  
"Yeah but imagine Kakashi Sensei with a bowl cut."

  
"Oh no... arrgh I'll never unsee that!"

  
"Captain Yamato with a bowl cut!

  
"Naruto!"

  
"I think I still have that spandex suit Lee gave me..." they have to pause for a few minutes at a conveniently low flat wall after that as Sakura wheezes out full cheerful laughter.

  
"So what is it that's giving you so much trouble?" Sakura asks with her breath fogging the air.

  
"I dunno Sakura." He huffs out his own cloud of steam and watches as it curls up into the early fading light of winter.

  
"Nothing caught your eye?"

  
"Well Sai already has really good art stuff and everything I see is either stuff he already has or it's super lame."

  
"We can focus on him later then. Nothing for Sensei?"

  
"He's got all the books I was looking at."

  
"Okay," Sakura glares at him like he's trying to be difficult. "Captain Yamato?"

  
"Nothing! Nothing seems special enough for any of you. You all matter to me and I've never really given a gift before, like a real gift, so I want to get this right. You know?"

  
And in the moment he says it the words fill his chest like they were meant to live there and expand between his ribs, space to be filled around his heart. Nothing ever seems special enough for the people in his life. He has bled and cried and stood with them shoulder to shoulder through hell. You can't really buy something that compares to that. What does he have to give back in the face of that?

  
"The first gift I ever gave anyone was a rock."

  
"You what?"

  
"I gave my dad a rock I'd found." Sakura says, slowly with distant eyes. "It was pale grey but when the light hit just right it sparkled. I must have been two, maybe three." He can imagine it. Sakura was a cute kid when they had first met, as a really little kid she must have been unbearably precious. To be fair though, looking back they were all cute kids. "My father still has it."

  
"No way!"

  
"He keeps it on the windowsill of the living room. Says it keeps me close." She stretches a bit and then turns to smile at him. "Do you get what I'm saying?"

  
Somehow Naruto suspects that Sakura is not advising him to give everyone rocks.

  
"So something... smaller?"

  
"More like something that's from you. We don't care if it's big or the best thing ever, just something that's from you. Now come on, let's get some taiyaki and then keep looking."

  
Naruto decides as she pulls him along; for all that Sasuke can push him further, Yamato and Sai keep him from stagnating, and Sensei can give him a clear path, Sakura is perhaps the one who is best at reminding him of what he's truly aiming for.

 

* * *

 

 

"It's going to be too sweet." Sasuke says once again and Naruto watches Sai ignore his bitching like a champ.

  
"They're traditionally sweet Sasuke-kun. The recipe called for less sugar than others I have encountered in my research." To Naruto's untrained eye the many baked goods look like they could stand to be sweeter.

  
"Something savoury would have been better."

  
"But not accurate to the recipe." Sakura watches their exchange as well from where she and the other girls are standing and raises an eyebrow. "If you would like to make something yourself you are quite welcome to." Sasuke lets out a single "hn" and turns to stalk back into the kitchen, his empty sleeve fluttering just dramatically enough he could deny it was intentional.

He's not sure entirely how Sasuke manages to be one armed all the time, Naruto got so used to having an arm back within a week of the procedure and it'll take another insane moon goddess to make him give a limb up again. But he can already hear clanking and shifting that indicates Sasuke is about to prove that even if he's short handed, so to speak, he's still fully capable of being a better cook than Naruto or Sakura could ever hope to be.

  
The hokage residence is warm despite the sheer size of it, noisy and full of the smells he used to catch hints of walking down the street as a child. It's also full of what seems to be every person he's ever met. He hears Lee crowing about something across the room and even if he can't see Neji grimacing he can imagine it all too well. Mirai toddles past chasing one of Kakashi Sensei's ninken, and Shikamaru is shoving his way after her like an overprotective big brother.

The night is wining and dining, talks of both the past year and what the future holds, and without question it is a good night right up through one in the morning when Sai and Kakashi have shooed the last guest out the door and he's picking up disposable cups off the shelves and tables. Kakashi turns, claps his hands together.

  
"Gifts!"

  
"We haven't finished cleaning up, sempai."

  
"Now now, Tenzo-"

  
"Yamato." Naruto rolls his eyes, he can't quite understand why Yamato is so fussy about a name he uses just as regularly as the one Naruto knows him by. Tenzo, Yamato, Cat, no matter what he's still the same man under it all. But maybe fussy is the wrong word. It was more like a joke by now.

  
"That can wait until morning. Naruto, come over here. Sakura you too."

  
"Oh are we doing gifts? Give me a moment!"

  
So they curl around the low table on the tatami floor and toss gifts back and forth like training kunai. Arm guards and books, wolf paperweights and cheesy photos in nice frames. And he waits on his gifts for the last minute.

  
"Seeds?" Yamato asks with a bemused look. Sasuke is holding his new book of Wind Country cuisine loosely but not casually.

  
"Something we can do together, you know. Time is something I can give you even if it's not fancy jewelry or the best weapons." Sakura opens the envelope with the tickets for that dessert tasting tour she'd been thinking about and her smile is radiant. "It's not much but well-"

  
"It's enough." Kakashi says quietly, holding the piece of paper Naruto wrote a meeting time and location on. Sai is holding the reference photos for that splatter art style and in his own way looks intrigued.

  
"Well it was either this or rocks so-"

  
Sakura laughs so hard nobody hears the rest of what he has to say.

**Author's Note:**

> Good grief okay it's not as polished as I wanted but here you are. This is what I get for moving in December. Hope you like it!


End file.
